Editorial: Sikorsky sale can build on long tradition

Updated 10:23 am, Wednesday, July 22, 2015

In 1797 Eli Whitney, operating out of a small gun shop in Middletown, figured out how to mass produce rifles.

It was this development that soon left Connecticut with the sobriquet, the Arsenal of Democracy. Whitney was a member of a long line of New England inventors who, as historian Jacob Bronowski pointed out, were “not obedient to tradition,” preferring instead to head out in new directions to find novel and groundbreaking ways of doing things.

With the advantage of ample water power and nearby sources of iron ore, copper, hardwood and other raw materials, the state soon found itself in the position of building arms and a host of other goods needed to defend American interests around the globe. The Norden bombsight, the F4U Corsair, Electric Boat submarines, Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, Hamilton Standard propellers, Waterbury Clock bomb timers, New Departure ball bearings, billions of small arms cartridges — the list of defense goods made in Connecticut was a long one.

Always near the top of that list for the last 60 years were the helicopters built in Stratford by Sikorsky Aircraft. Igor Sikorsky emigrated from Russia in 1919 and soon afterward founded the company that bears his name. He certainly could be counted as one of those who were not obedient to tradition; Sikorsky’s first major success was the four-engine Pan Am Clipper, the flying boats that arguably gave rise to international air travel as we know it today.

Sikorsky’s passion, however, was the development of rotor-wing aircraft, a dream that took shape on Sept. 14, 1939, when in Stratford he flew his VS-300, the world’s first practical helicopter. This was 10 years after his company teamed up with what was then the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, soon to become United Aircraft. To those who grew up in Connecticut in the 1950s and 1960s, United Aircraft was a dominant force in the state. Uncounted tens of thousands of people either worked for the defense and spaceflight giant or were employed by the scores of companies large and small that were its subcontractors.

It was unsettling to us when it became known in March that United Technologies — UA’s name since 1975 — wanted to shed itself of Sikorsky, a company that had been the darling of the UT stable for decades. After all, the UT-Sikorsky relationship goes back 86 years.

So it was with no small relief to learn this week that Sikorsky’s new parent will be one of the giants of the aerospace industry, Lockheed Martin, a company that, as with Sikorsky, is proud of its heritage. The list of their iconic flying machines seems almost endless: the Lockheed Vega, the B-26 Marauder, the C-130 Hercules, the U2, the F104 Starfighter, the SR-71 Blackbird, we could go on.

The 8,000 people who work for Sikorsky — the largest corporate employer in Fairfield County — can take comfort in the fact that they are in experienced hands.